STREETSCAPES/The Museum of the City of New York; Preserving the Past, Planning the Future

THE on-again off-again expansion project of the Museum of the City of New York is on again -- and this time it seems to be for certain. Since the early 1990's, the Georgian-style museum, on Fifth Avenue from 103rd to 104th Street, has had different designs on the boards to build into its wide backyard, as was originally planned. Now the project has been reduced from seven stories to two -- but it really is to start next month.

The museum was founded by Henry Collins Brown, a Scottish-born writer who was enthralled by New York when he arrived at age 13. Brown did not care for what he saw as the stuffy, forbidding character of the New-York Historical Society, established in 1804, and sought a more populist approach to presenting the city's story. So he created a new museum, taking over Gracie Mansion, the future mayoral residence, in 1923.

Brown had published widely on the history of New York and had become in the public mind the single person most associated with the city's past. His idea prospered, but in 1926, he was suddenly replaced by the board for unstated reasons. It must have been a crushing blow.

Brown's successor, Hardinge Scholle, intensified the search for new quarters, and the city offered the blockfront of Fifth Avenue from 103rd to 104th. The trustees selected Joseph H. Freedlander's impeccable but bloodless neo-Georgian design, a great U-shape of red brick and white marble around a garden forecourt. At a time of skyscraper modernism and the Art Deco style, Freedlander's design was a polite nod backward, but it also played nicely against the fortresslike Historical Society building, at 77th and Central Park West.

Scholle shared some of Brown's populist fervor, and told The New York Times in 1929 that he wanted to collect material on private houses and tenements, dogcarts and elevated trains, even every newsreel ever made in the city. "The display of 20 of these reels at a single sitting," he said, "will give a picture of New York such as could be obtained in no other way."

At the 1932 opening, The Times said that "the halls were as crowded as the aisles of a department store during the week before Christmas." Displays included predictable things like period dress and the sword of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director general of New Netherland, but also more commonplace items, like the shop sign of a bootmaker.

Freedlander's design included a provision for expanding onto an additional plot at the rear, about half the size of the museum's existing footprint.

The museum remained popular. In 1938, The Times said that, with an annual attendance of more than 200,000, it had already outgrown its new building -- but nothing more was ever built.

Beginning in the 1990's, the museum explored a series of plans, like moving to the Tweed Courthouse near City Hall or merging with the Historical Society. But those projects stalled.

Another idea was to expand onto the rear lot, for which the architects James Stewart Polshek & Associates designed a seven-story-high gridlike brick facade that responded to the original design while remaining contemporary. But that project faltered.

Now, after two years as president, Susan Henshaw Jones has been able to marshal city funds for a revised Polshek expansion, downsized from seven floors to two. Although far less than the original plan, it does add space on the critical first floor, with a new gallery just behind the main stairway.

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The building has long felt lopsided, with exhibition rooms leading off only one side of the long central hall, which was meant to have rooms on both sides. The new work will also include doors at the south end of the hall leading to a new terrace outside.

The Polshek firm has had to design against the broad circulation core, which blocks access to the area of the new gallery. So they have threaded a wide doorway under the high side of Freedlander's elegant, curved stairway of marble.

Freedlander's original expansion designs show access to the rear only at the north and south ends of the central hall, with the central stairway area undisturbed. But that is not possible with the current plan, and the new, centrally placed connection to the back is a frankly modern intervention. Ms. Jones, former head of the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the National Building Museum in Washington, said that work would be finished in 2007.

"Since 1923 we have been collecting steadily, but the building has never changed," she said. This contrasts with other major museums, like the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, which have expanded since their founding, in some cases several times. Ms. Jones said construction would begin next month.

Now is a good time to visit this institution, and not just for what's new, like "Timescapes," a deft multiscreen summary of the history of New York. Long-term exhibits often reveal a museum's essential character, without buzz or banners. One is the endearing but slightly dusty toy collection, with 1890's board games and homemade street toys from a century later.

The deliciously old-fashioned gallery of New York's harbor has everything from well-used longshoremen's crate hooks to a 1932 Norman Bel Geddes model for a streamlined passenger liner. In a blockbuster age, they are easy to skip, but they offer a more contemplative kind of museum-going.

An unexpectedly startling exhibit dates from the museum's beginnings. It is a large relief model of the houses, wharves, yards and even hedges of the tiny city in 1660, when it stretched only from the Battery to Wall Street.

It is unapologetically as old-fashioned as a starched collar. But with some imagination you can roam among the miniature houses and trees, walking up the "Broad Way" to the original timber stockade that gave Wall Street its name, and down to the wide canal that did the same for Broad Street, and for a few captivating moments be transported back three and a half centuries.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

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A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2005, on Page 11011011 of the National edition with the headline: STREETSCAPES/The Museum of the City of New York; Preserving the Past, Planning the Future. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe